The new vogue for public executions was most successful in Thuringia. Even the SD was disturbed by the scale of popular enthusiasm when 800–1,000 spectators flocked to watch the mass hanging of twenty Poles in Hildburghausen – and that was not counting the 600–700 women and children whom the police prevented from attending. But this was a region conspicuous for its early conversion to National Socialism and where Protestant pastors had embraced the German Christian movement wholesale: there were no institutions here which encouraged any other view of
